An Assessment of Dental Health State Utility Values

Attitudes towards disease and its outward manifestations are altering, and are also to some extent, culturally determined. In order to plan services and train personnel who will adequately serve the needs of any given population, it is essential that the psychological and social consequences of ill health are measured. Objectives: This study has been planned to measure the impact of tooth loss, which itself is the end result of poor oral health and non-preventively oriented services. The study aims to measure the value placed on oral health, by measuring the disutility of tooth loss in an Iranian population.

Method: One hundred patients with some experience of tooth loss attending Kerman Dental School in South of Iran were recruited to the study as volunteer and signed a consent form. Each participant was presented with different scenarios of tooth loss in different parts of the mouth. The scenarios were presented both verbally and pictorially using model mouths. For each scenario the patient marked visual analogue scale, which will have the anchors “a mouth could not be worse” and “a mouth could not be better”. The distance of the patients mark from the end of the visual analogue scale was measured and mean measurement for a given scenario for the group constituted the utility value for tooth loss in the position described.

Results: With a utility value of 0.0 representing the worst possible health state for a mouth and 1.0 representing the best, the mean utility values for the worst position were missing of maxillary central incisors and also shortened dental arch from 3-3 teeth (0.0±0.02).

Conclusion: Participants placed a low value on loosing a single back tooth, however loosing more teeth in posterior area was very important. From esthetical point of view loosing incisor teeth was very important in Iranian population.